Key People:
Doc Watson
Odetta

Newport Folk Festival, folk-music festival, held annually in Newport, Rhode Island, that focuses primarily on American traditions.

Founded by music producer George Wein, his business partner Albert Grossman, and several singer-songwriters, the Newport Folk Festival, first staged in 1959, had the aim of showcasing the diversity of American folk music, from rural traditions to urban popular styles. The bill of the inaugural event included professional folk musician Pete Seeger; the Kingston Trio, who had recently released a commercially successful interpretation of the Appalachian ballad “Tom Dooley”; and the then unknown singer-songwriter Joan Baez. The event drew an audience of some 13,000 and subsequently became an annual affair, continuing without interruption for more than a decade. Folksinger Bob Dylan was introduced to the festival crowd in 1963. He proved so popular that he returned in 1964 and again in 1965, when he famously challenged the widely accepted notion that “authentic” folk music was acoustic music. Backed by a blues band using electric amplifiers, his performance was booed by much of the audience. The booing has been interpreted most popularly as an unequivocal commentary on Dylan’s “plugged-in” playing, but the actual cause of the commotion has remained controversial. Some, for instance, have blamed the negative response on the brevity of Dylan’s set, while others have attributed it to technical troubles. In any event, the performance essentially altered the course of folk music in the United States.

The Newport Folk Festival began to experience financial difficulties in the late 1960s, and as a result, no production was planned for 1970. Although scheduled to resume in 1971, the festival was ultimately canceled—less than a week before its opening—in the wake of unrest at the Newport Jazz Festival. For the next 15 years, the Newport Folk Festival lay dormant.

Graphic of "60's" with flowers and peace sign. 1960's, decades
Britannica Quiz
That Swinging ’60s Quiz

Spearheaded by Wein and his company, Festival Productions, Inc., the festival returned in 1985, with some important changes. Whereas the earlier productions had been nonprofit events, the revived version was a for-profit venture. Moreover, evening concerts were discontinued, and the venue was moved away from the Newport downtown area to the nearby Fort Adams State Park, which could accommodate only about 10,000 guests. Although many of the musicians originally slated to perform at the aborted 1971 festival—including Arlo Guthrie and Judy Collins—appeared on the 1985 bill, the festival began to implement a policy of counterbalancing performances by veteran folk musicians with presentations by new artists. In 1986, for instance, the festival gave a spot to the 14-year-old fiddle virtuoso Alison Krauss, who later became a superstar of bluegrass music.

Beginning in 1987, the festival relied heavily on corporate sponsorship, with the name of the sponsor typically included in the festival’s official title. In 2007 Wein merged his company with another organization, which managed the event for the next two years. However, when the new company defaulted on its payments to Rhode Island, the state canceled the festival’s contract. Wein again took the reins and in 2009 put on George Wein’s Newport Folk Festival 50, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the festival’s first staging. With Wein’s sponsorship, the event continued into the second decade of the 21st century.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Mindy Johnston.

folk music, type of traditional and generally rural music that originally was passed down through families and other small social groups. Typically, folk music, like folk literature, lives in oral tradition; it is learned through hearing rather than reading. It is functional in the sense that it is associated with other activities, and it is primarily rural in origin. The usefulness of the concept varies from culture to culture, but it is most convenient as a designation of a type of music of Europe and the Americas.

The concept of folk music

The term folk music and its equivalents in other languages denote many different kinds of music; the meaning of the term varies according to the part of the world, social class, and period of history. In determining whether a song or piece of music is folk music, most performers, participants, and enthusiasts would probably agree on certain criteria derived from patterns of transmission, social function, origins, and performance.

The central traditions of folk music are transmitted orally or aurally, that is, they are learned through hearing rather than the reading of words or music, ordinarily in informal, small social networks of relatives or friends rather than in institutions such as school or church. In the 20th century, transmission through recordings and mass media began to replace much of the face-to-face learning. In comparison with art music, which brings aesthetic enjoyment, and popular music, which (often along with social dancing) functions as entertainment, folk music is more often associated with other activities, such as calendric or life-cycle rituals, work, games, enculturation, and folk religion; folk music is also more likely to be participatory than presentational.

The concept applies to cultures in which there is also an urban, technically more sophisticated musical tradition maintained by and for a smaller social, economic, and intellectual elite in cities, courts, or urbanized cultures. Generally, “folk music” refers to music that broad segments of the population—particularly the lower socioeconomic classes—understand, and with which they identify. In this respect it is the rural counterpart to urban popular music, although that music depends mainly on the mass media—recordings, radio, television, and to some degree the Internet—for dissemination.

Traditionally, folk music performers were amateurs, and some folk songs were literally known to all members of a community; but specialists—instrumentalists and singers of narratives—were important to folk communities. In the 20th century, the role of professionals as performers and carriers of folk traditions expanded dramatically. Folk music as it is believed to have existed in earlier times may be discussed separately from periods of revival such as that of 19th-century European nationalism and the 20th-century revivals, shortly before and after World War II, that were motivated by political agendas. In the context of popular music, performances of “folk music” may be distinguished by the use of songs with political agendas and the use of traditional instruments and acoustic guitars. On the other side of the musical spectrum, lines between folk music and art music were blurred beginning in the 19th century, when art music composers introduced songs from folklore into urban musical culture.

Young girl wearing a demin jacket playing the trumpet (child, musical instruments, Asian ethnicity)
Britannica Quiz
Sound Check: Musical Vocabulary Quiz

The terms used for folk music in different cultures illuminate aspects of the concept. The English term and its French and Italian analogues, musique populaire and musica popolare, indicate that this is music associated with a social class, the “folk.” The German Volksmusik (“people’s music”) combines the concept of class with the unification of an ethnic group, as does the Hindi term log git (“the people’s music”) in India. Czech, like some of the other Slavic languages, uses the term narod (“nation”) and its relatives, indicating that folk music is the musical unifier of all Czechs. Conversely, the Persian term mūsīqī-ye maḥallī (“regional music”) emphasizes the distinctions in folk music style and repertory among different areas of Iran. The term folk music has also, perhaps unwisely, been used for traditional art musics of Asian and African cultures, to distinguish them from the Western classical system.

The typical 21st-century conception of folk music comes from beliefs about the nature of music and musical life in the village cultures of Europe from the 18th into the 19th century; but this traditional folk music culture was affected greatly by the rise of industrial society and of cities, as well as by nationalist movements beginning in the 19th century. Both the threat to folk culture and the rise of nationalism spurred revival and preservation movements in which learned musicians, poets, and scholars provided leadership. In the 20th century, further revivals associated folk music with political and social movements and blurred the musical distinctions among folk, art, and popular musics. Nevertheless, vigorous remnants of the traditional culture of folk music were retained in 19th-century western Europe and in eastern Europe into the 20th century; these are the bases for the following characterization.

Are you a student?
Get a special academic rate on Britannica Premium.